text | Header: URGENT QUESTION

[callsignhornet]

I have an important question for the sake of organizing information about the group.

Feel free to message me directly if you don't feel comfortable sharing publicly.

In the world you are from, what year is it?

Edit: record of death for me should be 2186. Or 2187, though it would be very early in the year.

Comments

[hasapoint]

Sorry to hear that. You hate to have to address something civilization-ending.

After a couple of thousand years it started to happen again because it just fucked Velgarth up that badly, that it was going to keep echoing. I joined up with a team put together to try and stop that from happening. The most multinational coalition anyone's made in a very long time, actually. We averted the worst but there was a lot of damage along the way.

So that's why I'm here. I'd have preferred to make it through, but it worked and most of the others survived. If my calculations aren't all based on air, then if there's a third recurrence it will be a lot less destructive, and a fourth would be minor in comparison.

[callsignhornet]

Ours was about that long between incidents. Orchestrated by sentient machines that thought they should cull the various species in the universe every few millennia, assimilate the data they could get from our genetics, and keep everything under control.

It took the last two years of my life, but my crew and I forged a multi-planet initiative to stop the beings terrorizing us.

[There's a pause and then another message.]

The end is... fuzzy, but if I didn't succeed, then I know my crew finished what we started.

[hasapoint]

So we have a bit in common! Though that sounds like something with considerably more malice involved. Genetics is those elements that tell the body how to grow and be shaped, aren't they? And are heritable. There is a lot of information there I suppose.

[and some things just aren't going to make sense to her without a whole lot of patient explanation, she's aware. Need cannot imagine what machines, which she understands to be metal constructs that sometimes are people and sometimes not, would do with whatever form of the word 'genetics' is appropriate.

She does basically get the concept of genetics though. Altering them is something that's survived in a rough form, though nothing like pre-Cataclysm when designing new species was a mark of power and status.]

I hope so.

[callsignhornet]

We called them the Reapers. Clever, I know, but it got the point across fast. They seemed to consider it like pruning an overgrown shrub.

[hasapoint]

How pleasant of them. I've known people like that but mercifully they've all worked on a smaller scale.